Lepner's Pond*

is neither mosquito free
nor beautiful;

pond scum ridden, black water
at night as if at dusk it forgets

how to glimmer and be light
on its lean long legs.

Lepner's pond shudders as the breeze plays
sleight across its surface and goose

bumps line its face. (nor beautiful,) but
home is even in the mosquitos'

familiar twitch,
an echo

of something almost out of reach.


*It took so fucking long, but I finally got this bitch out. Lepner's Pond, I present to thee, my poem. Other than this, I haven't written in ages - I feel sad and blocked up. Maybe fiber ought help?

TO RETURN

AFTER THESE COMMERCIAL MESSAGES.

garfield minus garfield

i know this has been aroung the net a lot. but humor me.

http://garfieldminusgarfield.tumblr.com

look at some of these. can we make a little assignment somehow related to these? they're so tragic without garfield.

sketchy sketcher

So my friend told me I should accompany every poem I write now with a sketch, because I'm trying to be a better sketcher. So, here's what I've come up with so far.

the correct way to prepare a pan:

for cooking eggs.

It's a little heat to start,

to whet the pan, and a great
hunger for the meal at hand

undressing, as the melting butter
browns and starts to burn.

for frying chicken,

it's no longer subtle. Oil keeps

the meat in check and bread crumbs

neat the fine

edges between over raw and over

loved, since fire loves its prey
and heat is always first hand.

for french toast

the lesson is in how much and enough

sugar, milk and eggs one needs to come out

sweet. The dosage for dipping the bread

depends on the delectation of specific tongues

-tied in delight. Imagine you are the one, waiting

for the sugar-rush, but prepared to salt to taste.

the bends

will snap your prick in half,

will unwind your long thin

breath and turn you over.

your lungs will explode.

it's no good, surfacing.

*SWIPE* 14ourteen

March 10, 2008, 3:01 pm
Seven More Sins, Thanks to Vatican
By Mike Nizza
Lust, gluttony, greed and the rest of the seven deadly sins gathered in the 6th century will have to get used to a modern companion. A Vatican official has articulated seven new categories of sin “due to the phenomenon of globalization.”
“While sin used to concern mostly the individual, today it has mainly a social resonance,” Monsignor Gianfranco Girotti told L’Osservatore Romano, Vatican City’s local paper. Bloomberg News parsed his remarks into a clip-n-savable list:
1. “Bioethical” violations such as birth control
2. “Morally dubious” experiments such as stem cell research
3. Drug abuse
4. Polluting the environment
5. Contributing to widening divide between rich and poor
6. Excessive wealth
7. Creating poverty
The message, according to a leading scholar on Catholic thought talking to BBC News, was meant as a reality check to priests “not sufficiently attuned to some of the real evils in our world.” There is more to life than following the Ten Commandments, it would seem.



back to me: the vatican is declaring something as sinful that they themselves describe as "morally dubious?" Isn't that syntactically nonsense?

And, while we're at it, looks like the Catholic Church really wants some more members.

WHO CARES??!?!?!

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/05/books/05fake.html?8dpc

goodnight, friends, goodnight.

Lepner’s Pond

1. approaching lepner at sunset

like a UFO made out of lipstick, Lepner offends
the eye, a pillar of tangerine in chocolate reality

no, wait, stop. He can’t.

Like Jesus fog, Lepner is a rock wrapped around
the water wrapped around the fog. Eleven times himself,
he divides and conquers, he is something else boy.

2.) From the distance,

he reddens, hueing up again, purpling
like busted fingernails. He shifts, he snuggles
into color, he wears things. Clothing is an
artifact of nakedness, it is a necessity of nudity,
rather than a consequence of bodies.
his pond, sullen, looking on.

3.) the garden of saints
like everything you were too afraid to confront,
the pond divides, segments, geometrizes,
in factors of seven, making cubism of St. Andrew’s
upside down toes, driving triangle nails through Thomas’ toes.

like everything you were afraid of, the water has
teeth, Lepner has teeth, everything in the world,
blurred blue, now orthodontic. Earth is

an overbite, waiting for an almighty corrective,
something fixable, something willing to fix.
like everything you fear, the divine science
is bejawed, an event horizon of bone.

Kneeling to conserve spelling, a rosary of
Darwin, a Hail Mary for String Theory,
Let’s hear it for closeness, for the backing, for
everything you are afraid of,
rising, blue, painting you.

4.) fog
no gene pool could possibly deliver you.

Yo!

Caroselli, where you at?

night out assignment

dance. dancedance. dance. CRAZY. CRAZY. CRZY. CRZY. // -ation

"dance, dance / we're falling apart to half time"
fallout boy. "dance, dance"

i. 3rd floor party and the lights are out

me, the red-shirt glory monger
fist full of flask, flask full of spiritus
mundi mind-fuck. I'm quasi-transcendent
as the line evolves. I want to fuck.

ii. at dino's, I'm

high
resolution and widescreen panoramic
shoe-gazing at her left tit, hoping for a contact
high.


iii. still at dino's parts 3-10 and the bolshevik revolution is happening in my head

horny as rose is thorny,
I'm tripping dance steps like angry fractals:
bitch, try to bite this -

i'm a fucking oyster and my pearl's a diamond.
Then it's like acoustic guitar, like agammenon

said fuck troy, changed his mind, took up
Love.

iv. phone sex

is the only way into a man, the only come
down worth coming down for.

His short breaths itch my short hairs
and my state stutters out, 'emergency'

before it all goes white, cut the sound
fade to black, cue the lights.

plague of onces

‘said “come alone!”
“yes!”
why put the party where the party don’t wanna go?’ – Future of the Left~

what I’ve got to show for it: three cigarettes,
gold foil, a business card, egg mcmuffin in the fridge.

calculus is a black hole on Saturday nights – equations
split, exponents degrade, cigarette ashes flung
from the wind dot my coat,
evil vertices, all of them, quadrangles pentagramming in
a bored mind –

statistics justify the premise. the justification postulates
the statistics. a night spent drinking, a night spent to justify
all the other nights you have to take to get this one.

this is not that kind of night. embers parabola around my head,
lobbyist haloes, but all I can do is bitch. later I discover that my cigarette
burns through my shirt. I don’t pay attention because my undershirt browns
oh so nicely, like a bookburning. I wish I had something edgy to be pissed about,
like the Tories or the environment. Seething rage can’t be

applied, like coupons at a supermarket. Kanye West probably
is playing connect four with Armani while drinking shiraz and eating truffles. I’m listening to Pavement by myself, watching people from high
school shoot fake buck with orange plastic shotguns. they cock ‘em like
men who know how to cock.

I’ve sworn off heterosexuals, damn them to a plague of onces. Like Moses,
surrounded by antlers and genny light, I deliver judgment upon the self-aware.
in my evil geometry, I diagram against neon, painstaking, becoming
the verb, “to deliver unto.”

Assignment: Night Out

in addition to the assignments we have yet to post (see "lepner's pond" and "the susan b anthony national historical women's suffrage reenactment at 2pm saturdays"), my assignment, in part inspired by such wonderful tunes as "jigsaw falling into place" by radiohead and "plague of onces" by future of the left, is to a.) write about a night out, drinking, in the style which your nights out are currently proceeding in (aka, i haven't had a night of dancing in a long time, so it'd be untrue for me to write about that at all), and b.) explicitly utilize a sample from a song that inspires your feelings about the night out, or is in some way demonstrative of it.

ahead is my personal response to the assignment. it should be said that since my manuscript stuff, i have only written two poems, of varying quality. so if it's bad, that's what happens.

Don't you wanna get out of Cape Cod, outta Cape Cod tonight?

So this Vampire Weekend band. Most blogged about band of 2008 so far? Some of my more loquacious indie friends informed me prior to getting this album that it sounded like the Beatles meets Fela Kuti. Which was basically either a.) a lie to get me excited, or b.) a statement said by someone dying for the indie-hipster Graceland.

Considering that in a couple days it's not going to be cool to like them, here's your chance to get on the train. They're just a fun, catchy, mellow pop band. They're the definition of indie pop- pretentious and precious all at once, catchy and purposefully arranged - see the second track, "Oxford Comma," a rant about a person who uses their language pretentiously. The track kinda mirrors the topic, so let's hope that's sarcasm.

The thing is, I could close my eyes and very easily imagine that all these songs were on some 80's pop record. Almost all the tracks, save "Walcott" (which contains the title of the post), seem forced and self-aware of their own project - Oxford Comma is an island flavored jam, A-Punk is post-Clash reggae flavored punk.

But a couple of songs are timeless, so maybe all the blog freak outs are just looking ahead to what could happen. "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa" is arguably the most "African-flavored" cut on an album hyped to sound very african. It's not, but it's a bunch of boss pop songs. If you can get over a bunch of white kids from Columbia University appropriating African and Latin music wily-nilly, then you'll get to enjoy a really trippy summer day pop album. But that's what i think about it. Ain't even cool to like them anymore.

A spin-off of the Susan B. Anthony Reenactment Project and my Weird Science, Hard Poems class

The Ladies' Cosmology Club

Currently Listening to:
The voice of Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon in my head.

a note:

Regarding the otherworldly
Om, Mrs. Shallott wonders
circles around & between

the subject. Her matter is
at the crux of falsehood &
comprehension, therefore

best solved before lunch.

Next, is the cosmic-egg
theory plausible? Studies show
cyclical universes are unpopular

demographically. A tidy cosmos
is always preferable.

everyone knows about this but...

thought I'd put it up regardless. Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies are a bunch of notecards with maxims on them regarding the artistic or musical process. They're designed to eliminate blocks and stalls and to reimagine the work in a new light. This rarely works for me - instead it causes me to start something drastically different than the original work but that's cool too. Eno's very big on hard work - art should be hard work, but not the creative agony and turmoil it turns into for many (including me).

You've got to buy the notecards, I believe, to see them all, but a website online has a selection of them, randomly picked whenever you reload the page. Occaisionally they are intellegible maxims - "when faced with two choices, do both" - but most are koan-like, a bit of calculated riddle absurdity to get the brain frustrated enough or inspired enough. "Change nothing and continue consistently." "Give way to your worst impulse." "Always give yourself credit for having more than personality." "Accretion." "Lost in Territory."

http://www.thraeryn.org/strategies/draw.cgi

They're really fun, actually. And a handmade deck makes a wonderful birthday gift to the aspiring soon-to-be-23 year old writer in your life. Not that I want lots of gifts (yes).

And yes, on Jan 14th, I will officially be the world's oldest man. Can we do something soon to make me feel young and alive again, like I did in my salad days of youth?

lung genesis

the intake at the start, jet-engines in
the stone age, the oxygenated awakening,
the half life of fatigue, the entropy of process

Steve says that it started with naming, it started
with creative taxonomy, with the demarcation of joy.

language like joint compound on brick, like Pollock
in a paint factory. the creation of referents, the weight of
context hanging albatrossly. who has more power – the one who
creates, or the one who points to say

Babs said it was dark, light, wet, dry, crowded, delicious,
empty. Adjectives forming a mass of suffering, a pain
fashioned only from qualifiers, Progressing through
qualities only to be slapped back into nothingness.

As though our inflation needed qualification.

Lauren said, while no one was listening, that a kind word
spawned the start of sin. Salmon leaping up waterfalls. It was not.

It breathed too hard for airless sin, taxonomy
it was not the start of samsara.

after the bubbles percolated, it respired.

I don't know what this is....

soft outro // the world ends in snow.

everywhere i look, there are portents of demise:

a rag and dirty doll with bug eyes of tiny button,
twisted paper tetrahedron spunk rag, once balled
unfolding.

//

It snows the sky as if stained with flecks of
static, the pulse-thick hand of god. Sight
obscured before the Lord of things white
and clean, like genocide. Hungry wolf-eyed
God says,
nothing.

she said, [writing exercise]

I've got to figure the universe is on fire, I've got to figure it fast and loose. My hands on the wheel and the highway like stars, the vroom vroom infinity. I figure it's reckless to be a woman, it has to be, otherwise women go mad from waiting to become themselves. My grip on the wheel is tight but not tense, I know the secret to the everything is how you hold it.

..His hands were like vice grips on my hips, his hair in my fingers like seaweed, limp from sweat. This is not pleasure. He asks if it's good, I moan from another body, one he is not burrowing into. Maybe I answer from Audrey Hepburn's body. I imagine that I'm the 60s sex-kitten, with pouty lips and a micro-mini and not with a pair of jeans around my ankle and a cotton sweater sticking to my back. In the other body, there is an orgasm building: my mind follows suit and I yell like..

I'm an archer and my quiver is empty. This is the state of the whole fucking world. Once I met a woman who had lost her baby, she was disappearing into nothingness holding her stomach. In two months, she wasn't anything. Half-dead, half-alive, completely invisible. Women are meant to be more than mothers. Women are soldiers and the war is.

..the universe on fire: cosmos like mouths and we're standing at it, praying broken prayers to the void. There is one body and one must use it. I was lying on the hood of his jeep and his skin pressing against mine was like fire. This is pleasure. Everywhere sparks were click-clicking into stars and I was full of a feeling like falling. I am not Audrey Hepburn. I am not a washing machine. I am

your girl, and I will protect you.*



*line from Xiu Xiu's, "Sad Pony Guerilla Girl"